


Coming Down

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: Canon Related, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 14:24:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Klaus, during and after his interrogation by Hasebe</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Down

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to make more of this, but nope. So I'm setting it free, all naked and puny as it is.

The crop smacks into Klaus’ shoulder with a vicious sting, and he makes a noise through his clenched teeth that’s the bastard child of a whine and a grunt. He wishes he were somewhere else, that he could just slip between the moments the blows land and be elsewhere...

...somewhere like the garden at Luckenwalde, standing under the rain-dulled sky with dropped laburnum flowers bruised under their feet, somewhere Taki says ‘yes’ when Klaus suggests that they run away back to Klaus’s little estate. Instead of the heat branded into his shoulder, Klaus feels the summer sun of his home beating into his back. The roses are harvested and the oil sold, but there’s still the work of the home farm that feeds them day to day. Taki is lean and brown, his sleeves folded up his arms like any farm boy. He has quite the hand with the small livestock, and the greatest betrayal that he ever knows from Klaus is when Klaus twists the neck of an old fowl that’s fit for nothing but the boiling pot.

But a Taki who’d abandon his crazy, backwards people wouldn’t be Taki, now would he? Crazy, backwards, _angry_ people like Hasebe. The heavy blow leaves Klaus’s ears ringing. He barely knows whether he’s up or down, although the rough floor scraping his face and arms seems to indicate that he’s down.

Somewhere else.... he’d like to take Taki flying one day. There aren’t so many planes around a tank division, but they must have something like T-24s sitting on a field somewhere in this country. It’s the cleanest joy Klaus has ever known, control and freedom and risk twined sweetly together. It’d be nice to share something pure with Taki.

He could almost welcome Hasebe’s poised sword because this way the smallest part of the mess he’s made will be cleaned up. Instead there’s a shattering noise and a looming shadow. For a man who fits neatly under Klaus’s jaw, Taki is so very tall. Stern. God-like in his mercy, and Klaus bends down and worships. He listens while Taki throws his lies over Klaus’s doings with the same grace as he throws his coat over Klaus’s beaten body.

The last dream is real, but Klaus doesn’t believe in it any more than the others. He’s lying in Taki’s big bed, with its linens that began white and scented with some pleasantly herbal tang now rumpled and marked with blood; Klaus’s blood, not Taki’s. He wonders idly what Suguri did with the sheet he wrapped around Taki earlier. Burned it, perhaps, the way he’d like to burn Klaus’s dead body like a piece of trash. But Taki’s rescued him from one fire, at least.

Klaus’s head lies in Taki’s lap, Taki’s hand resting gently in his hair. “He just now finally fell asleep,” Taki says. Taki’s wrong, even if Klaus has a measure of peace in this instant. You can’t sleep when you abandon your favourite poisons, no matter how much you long for the slide into nothingness. Klaus has been high on rage these past months, baffled mindless fury the second-best drug that’s ever glided through his veins, and coming down is going to be hard, even with the addictive sweetness of Taki’s body surrounding him. He wishes he could open his eyes because the look on that old wet hen Hasebe’s face would make him laugh, and Klaus could do with a laugh.

Taki’s hand rests on the nape of his neck now, and Klaus trembles. If he could he’d twist in Taki’s hold and lick that hand like a thirsty dog slobbering at a dish of sweet water after a long hunt. But with Taki, to take is to lose. Klaus has always known it but desperation drove him anyway, until today’s events leashed him like a yanked choke chain. He doesn’t know how he’ll bear stopping. What if he can’t? He thinks that maybe Taki’s sword in his guts might have been kinder than that gentle, possessive touch on his yearning, starving skin.

He wonders how you can so desperately love what you can’t have and will never, ever understand.


End file.
